SOCI 2001 week 3 Discussion Essay
Ethnic Groups
Culture, Race, & Ethnicity
As a sociology student, Janice has become very interested in the different factors influencing people’s identities and behaviors over time. Lately, Janice has been thinking about culture, race, and ethnicity. She realizes that these three concepts have areas of overlap as well as areas of divergence.
Janice comes to understand that culture has to do with the language, religion, and customs that characterize a particular group’s way of life. She learns that ethnicity usually refers to the national background with which a person identifies. For instance, Janice identifies herself as ethnically part Jewish, part Italian, and part Mexican.
Finally, Janice understands that race is a social construct that is often associated with skin color and other physical features but sometimes overlaps with identity. Racially, Janice identifies as white because that is how most people perceive her, but she knows that some people assume she is Latina, too.
Impacts on Behaviors
Janice starts thinking about the different ways culture, race, and ethnicity influence people’s behaviors. She knows that culture is something that people learn implicitly from the moment they are born. For example, babies are raised to be part of the culture they’re born into. SOCI 2001 week 3 Discussion Essay
Culture can impact so many different aspects of people’s behavior, including how they handle conflict, how they express different feelings through body language, and how they problem-solve.
For instance, Janice knows that some cultures are more collectively oriented, and people from these cultures might be more likely to help each other with a difficult school assignment. Other cultures are more individualistic, and people from these cultures might consider that same sort of help to be cheating.
Janice knows that race and ethnicity can also influence behaviors. People might act differently, for instance, if their race and ethnicity have historically given them privilege within a particular society. If people have personally or historically experienced discrimination because of their race and ethnicity, they might feel cautious, suspicious, or mistrusting of the dominant society in which they live.
Impacts on Attitudes
Janice knows that culture, race, and ethnicity can impact people’s attitudes, or how they feel about different issues. For example, if someone has been raised culturally to believe that babies sleep in bed with their parents, they might be shocked to learn that some people put their babies to sleep in a separate bed at night from day one. On the other hand, someone might be from a culture in which sleeping in a crib right away is normative, and she might be horrified or concerned about a parent who beds with her infant.
Race and ethnicity can also impact attitudes. Many people feel a strong sense of pride based on their ethnicity, and this is an important part of their attitudinal approach to the world and to other people. Racially, some people may feel consciously or unconsciously superior to or biased against others. If a person has never seen someone from his racial background in a position of power or represented positively in books and media, this can influence his attitude and beliefs about himself and others in negative and harmful ways. SOCI 2001 week 3 Discussion Essay
Ethnicity and social structure
Many studies have shown that ethnic diversity among actors can play a substantial role in influencing social and economic outcomes. For example, empirical socioeconomic research has found that ethnic diversity is generally associated with fragmentation and lower levels of trust across groups (Alesina and La Ferrara 2002, Ruttan 2006). In relation to public goods, ethnic diversity is often associated with a decreased ability to impose social sanctions, which can lead to collaborative failures (Miguel and Gugerty 2005, Baland et al. 2007).
In terms of social networks, previous research has shown that ethnic diversity can create ethnic boundaries (Baerveldt et al. 2004) and enclaves (Portes and Sensenbrenner 1993), and ethnicity has been identified as the number one cause of homophily, wherein individuals tend to associate with others similar to themselves (McPherson et al. 2001). Indeed, numerous studies looking at social structure have found evidence of strong preference for intra-ethnic-group relations (Schofield 1979, 1991, DuBois and Hirsch 1990, Clark and Ayers 1992, Currarini et al. 2009). This ethnic homophily effect is thought to be inflated under conditions of competition (Poteete and Ostrom 2004), which is a typical characteristic of common-pool resource systems (Costello et al. 2008). Indeed, a recent study by Pomeroy et al. (2007) found ethnicity, among other effects, to be a significant determinant of conflict over fisheries resources in Thailand. Though in some cases ethnic diversity among stakeholders has been found to have a negligible impact on cooperation across groups (Varughese and Ostrom 2001), the specific conditions under which this occurs is still poorly understood.SOCI 2001 week 3 Discussion Essay
Given the influence of ethnicity on social relationships coupled with the importance of social networks for collaboration in natural resource management, in this paper we explore the relationship between ethnic diversity and social network structure in a competitive common-pool resource system. Specifically, we use common metrics from social network analysis (SNA) and examine network homophily, network structure, and cross-scale linkages to infer characteristics of representation, cooperation, and communication in an ethnically diverse competitive pelagic fishery.SOCI 2001 week 3 Discussion Essay